I just saw this article on phasing. In short phasing is a technology where a player’s questing history influences what he sees in the world.
From the article
The potential for this technology is huge. We only saw glimpses of it in Blade’s Edge Mountains, where players and NPCs would disappear from or appear within view depending on your state. Blizzard takes it several steps further and applies the state to apply to structures, as well — whether, say, a house is intact or in disrepair
From the comments section:
Yea, that’s pretty cool. Just imagine, if they had used this technique from the start: that bridge in Lakeshire would be finished, Mankrik’s wife would be buried…
This sounds absolutely amazing. We have for the longest time been talking how the world was to static and never changed with whatever quests our characters completed. This technology would allow for you to change at least “your” world by doing quests. It would be nice to see it applied to old content as well.
Of course the downside is that if you are grouping for a quest and not everybody is on the same steps people may indeed see different things in the world. But if you want quests to tell stories and want everyone to be able to experience the story-telling it is next to impossible to avoid this.
WoW more and more feels like an evolving game. Are these expansions really expansions or rather sequels? The gaming experience has changed so much over the last few years. Right now it feels like WoW3 will be exactly that: the third installment of games in a series. The only weird thing is that each sequel obsoletes the previous games and that is what people cry about when lamenting how everything was better in the “good old times”.
I think the game has improved tremendously over the years. Many many changes have been made that have made the game more fun.
Nostalgia is fine, too, because nobody can bring back the experience of the classic wow game we played 3 years ago and it was fun back then.
I just think looking forward to exciting new stuff is better than playing and complaining about the game you play. So I look forward to all the small changes that are going to come. I especially hope this one is going to make a big impact on the game world.
